Friday May 27 2016 the European ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry decided that from 2020 all scientific articles must be freely available to everyone. This goal is part of a broader set of recommendations that has been done to promote open science. The Ministers also decided that research data, if possible, should be published as open data, and that the data must be made available to third parties.

This European decision for fully open access of scientific articles in 2020 is ahead of the position of Secretary Sander Dekker. Two years ago he decided that that in 2024 all scientific articles should be 100 percent open access available.